WHITMAN – The Whitman Middle School is officially on the ballot for the Saturday, Nov. 4 special Town Election after the Select Board on Tuesday, Sept. 26 voted to place the question before the voters.
Member Justin Evans attended the meeting remotely via Zoom and Chair Dr. Carl Kowalski was absent from the meeting.
A question for a debt exclusion to fund the DPW building project was delayed until 12:30 p.m., Friday, Sept. 29, so that the board can hear from Town Counsel on whether the town can use water/sewer rates to help fund the DPW project. [see below]. Town Counsel is seeking the opinion of a municipal finance board that only meets on Thursdays before offering advice on the matter, according to Town Administrator Mary Beth Carter.
The deadline for that decision is close of business on Friday.
Board member Shawn Kain read from a debt analysis he wrote on the town’s levy capacity [see page 7].
“The current tax levy is about $30 million,” he said after reading the analysis. “So when we’re talking about the red line, 12 percent of $30 million, that’s where that red line is.”
He said that the total levy was about $15 million when the new high school was built 20 years ago, and noted it could be $50 million 20 years from now.
The high school will come off the books in 2027, but Kain said, when it does, it will be at $350,000, but more than $8 million for the first year of the middle school will be there.
“That’s a big difference to consider,” Kain said. “The school [district] has made a very good presentation of their arguments for the school and even how much it’s going to cost individually, and people have to answer that question: ‘How much can I afford?’ The question we’re evaluating here is what can the town collectively afford – and that’s a different question, collectively, all together.”
He said that is why the town works with consultants and writes policy – to keep the town on sound financial ground.
Finance Committee member Rosemary Connolly, while thanking Kain for thinking about how the town handles debt, but said that happened a long time ago and there have been times in the last 20 years when the town carried no debt.
“Buildings erode, and we didn’t plan for this,” she said. “We had no rolling debt.”
She also argued, where the middle school is concerned, the town can’t give voters the “illusion that there is a choice – that there’s a cheaper option out there.”
“By law, we have to provide a building,” Connolly said. “This is the cheapest option, whether we want to pretend it’s not. Unless you figure out a way to stop inflation – and we’ve seen it with the DPW building and everything else – this is the point at which we can get the cheapest building.”
She said the real question is whether the town pays for the most it can get now, or comes back later and pays more for less building.
Renovation would trigger accessibility and fire codes that would also increase the cost, which the town would have to shoulder alone.
“We have to tell the truth to the public,” she said. “The truth is, we did not handle our capital and we did not handle our infrastructure well and now it’s come to a tipping point.”
Kain said he appreciated Connolly’s comments, but asked why the high school was so affordable and the middle school is not. While the building costs are high, he suggested that building the high school as a regional project is one of the reasons why it was more affordable.
“Did they consider a regional option?” he asked.
Building Committee Chair Fred Small, while cautioning he wasn’t trying to play Monday morning quarterback, said a regional middle school was an idea he had in 2013.
“It had been discussed in the past,” he said. “We do need a new middle school.”
The current building has outlived its useful life as far as systems – electrical, plumbing and HVAC – the major things, and special requirements have changed.
“The levy doesn’t move fast enough to encapsulate today’s construction costs,” Small said, noting that overall construction costs increased by about $7 million in the last six months.
Former WMS Building Committee member John Galvin also pointed to the building project South Shore Tech is planning, cautioning it would “catch us all by surprise.”
“We all knew they were accepted by the MSBA, but I think we were all surprised – or at least I was surprised – at how quickly they’re moving,” he said. “They were a couple of years behind us originally, but now they’re only about 10 months behind us. … They don’t have numbers yet, but they will soon.”
Galvin said SST’s website is projecting total costs at between $250 million and $300 million. Because Whitman has about 24 percent of the SST student body, 24 percent of the municipality share of that building – about $40 million – will come to the town.
“One of the things that bothers me is this debt is going to bring a lot of hardship to a lot of people,” Select Board member Laura Howe said. “I can’t speak to financial decisions of the past. … There’s nothing to be done about yesterday.”
She expressed fear that the costs of such projects would cause a “mass exodus from the town,” and said she is also concerned about the Duval and Conley schools, which are 20 years older than the middle school. “They have to look at what’s best for them,” she said of project costs vs household bills. “That’s why a voter votes.”
Lynam said he didn’t think the board was going to get anywhere with an 11th-hour discussion.
“A committee was formed,” he said. “They did an analysis. They met publicly over [three years] and they came up with a plan. The next step in that process is to present the plan to the public.”
That will be done at the Oct. 30 special Town Meeting and Nov. 4 ballot initiative.
“The discussions we’re having here are probably nothing compared to what we’re going to see at Town Meeting,” Lynam said.
The Select Board had questions as to whether a DPW ballot question should be on the same ballot as the Whitman Middle School project.
“I certainly have reservations about this,” Kain said. “I’m not comfortable going back to the voters for more money on a project … I’d rather find creative ways to get the money or be more disciplined about finding ways we can make the project work.”
Evans agreed, suggesting the decision on whether to place the question on the ballot should wait until they hear from counsel on Friday.
“My concern there is that, if the middle school project were to fail, we wouldn’t have a clear answer from the voters to say, ‘it’s because of the project,’” he said. “It could be we were confused because there were two questions on the ballot. I kind of want a clear direction from the voters on the middle school project, and I’m afraid this will muddy the waters.”
Salvucci said the question is only to provide a fallback in case Plymouth County ARPA funds were not an allowed use for completing the sewer force main project in order to free up other revenue sources for the DPW building.
He said the extra money is intended to address soil contamination at the site, which needs to be taken care of whether a building is placed there or not.
“We’re just setting [a question] so that, if something happens that we have no control over, which I don’t think is going to happen, we’re just covering ourselves to be able to get this project going and to clean up that soil.”
Howe said both questions should be left to the voters.
“We should give our voters the choice,” she said. “I think our voters are smart enough to know where they want our money to go.”
DPW building
During its joint meeting with the DPW Commissioners, the Board approved use of $2.2 million in Plymouth County ARPA funds to help pay for the sewer force main project to enable a Town Meeting article asking for the transfer of borrowing authority to the DPW building project.
A ballot question was delayed until Friday just in case the funding transfers were not approved by bonding counsel.
We are looking at the potential of not having to do a debt exclusion vote,” said Frank Lynam of the DPW Building Committee. “We may have to, it all depends how this final piece comes together. … I think, at this point, we’re all pretty confident that that’s going to work.”
The DPW committee had met just before the Select Board to discuss the need to raise additional funds for the project as Carter has been researching potential options, according to Lynam.
“This is only possible because so many previous articles came in under budget,” Evans said, thanking the DPW commissioners for conducting a well-run sewer main project. “We’ve caught every lucky break possible.”
He stressed the public is not being asked for additional money.
“We’re reallocating debt,” he said.
In addition to financial sources previously discussed, they also talked about borrowing funds, Lynam said.
“Our biggest concern was layering an additional level of borrowing on top of what is already being presented to the town,” he said. “Mary Beth suggested we look at the possibility of utilizing county ARPA funds to free up some of the debt commitment we’ve made to the sewer main replacement program.”
Discussions have been going back and forth on the issue between bond counsel and local counsel.
“I think it’s now in the hands of the umpire,” he said, but the committee expects to be able to commit about $2.2 million less on the sewer water main than previously voted and suggested extending that borrowing authority to the DPW building project. “We would not be borrowing any more money than we’ve previously committed, but we would be utilizing available funds to reduce the borrowing in one area to enable us in another without significantly increasing the cost to the ratepayer and the taxpayer.”
They are also looking at enterprise funds for a portion of the project funding.
Carter said the DPW project shortfall is $3,088,760 and by searching out remaining funds from previous projects, totalling $1,043,271.15 that there is $2.73 million remaining in Plymouth County ARPA funds. She recommended using $2.2 million of the ARPA funds toward the sewer force main project because the DPW building project is not one of the limited areas for which they can be used, but sewer/water project is.
A matching Town Meeting article for $2.2 million will ask voters to trade borrowing authority to the DPW building.
“I’ve checked with everybody, and everybody said that should work,” she said.